[Haskell-cafe] createProcess running non-existent programs

Alexander Kjeldaas alexander.kjeldaas at gmail.com
Tue Aug 14 23:09:51 CEST 2012


On 14 August 2012 17:22, Niklas Larsson <metaniklas at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2012/8/14 Alexander Kjeldaas <alexander.kjeldaas at gmail.com>:
> >
> >
> > On 13 August 2012 23:49, Richard O'Keefe <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On 13/08/2012, at 11:26 PM, Alexander Kjeldaas wrote:
> >>
> >> >
> >> > This isn't that hard - a pipe shouldn't be needed anymore.  Just
> require
> >> > a post-2003 glibc.
> >> >
> >> > fexecve is a system call in most BSDs.  It is also implemented in
> glibc
> >> > using a /proc hack.
> >>
> >> fexecve is now in the Single Unix Specification, based on
> >> POSIX as of 2008, I believe.  However,
> >> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/fexecve.html
> >> says
> >> Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:
> >>   *  This function is missing on many non-glibc platforms: MacOS X 10.5,
> >> FreeBSD 6.0,
> >>      NetBSD 5.0, OpenBSD 3.8, Minix 3.1.8, AIX 5.1, HP-UX 11, IRIX 6.5,
> >> OSF/1 5.1,
> >>      Solaris 11 2010-11, Cygwin 1.5.x, mingw, MSVC 9, Interix 3.5, BeOS.
> >>
> >> That warning doesn't seem to be fully up to date.  I'm using MacOS X
> >> 10.6.8
> >> and fexecve() isn't in the manuals or in <unistd.h>.
> >>
> >
> > FreeBSD 8.0 is covered.
> > OpenBSD not covered
> > OS X not covered
> >
> http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man2/execve.2.html
> > Solaris probably not covered.
> >
> > So support is pretty good, I'd say. For non-modern systems, checking the
> > existence of the file first is possible.  The race isn't important, and
> one
> > can always upgrade to a modern operating system.
> >
>
> The check would be unreliable, the file's existence doesn't imply that
> it's executable.


See access(2)


> Furthermore it would add unnecessary overhead,
> createProcess can be run thousands of times in a program and should be
> lean and mean.
>
>
Just to keep the bikeshedding doing, I'm going to state as a fact that
running performance sensitive *server* workload on any unix other than
Linux is purely of theoretical interest.  No sane person would do it.
 Therefore, from a performance overhead, Linux performance is the only
important performance measure.

But even given the above, the overhead we're talking about is minuscule.  A
program like '/bin/echo -n '''  which does exactly *nothing*, requires
35(!) system calls to do its job :-).
A more complex program like 'id' requires 250 system calls!

Also, to see just how minuscule this is, the dynamic linker, ld-linux.so
does a few extra access(2) system calls *to the same file*,
/etc/ld.so.hwcaps, on startup of every dynamically linked executable.  2 in
the 'echo' case, and 8 in the 'id' case above.  Even the glibc folks
haven't bothered to optimize those syscalls away.

Alexander
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